Saturday, June 2, 2012

The latest meme making the Beltway rounds at the urging of Mitt Romney’s
staff is that their candidate has really pulled a fast one on the
“conservative base” of his party: he’s a “moderate” (you know, like Bill
Clinton) who’s figured out he can keep the wingnuts happy just by being
a Breitbartian badass towards Obama. Give’ em Solyndra photo ops, the
meme suggests, and they won’t make Romney endorse the Gold Standard or a
Personhood Amendment. McKay Coppins wrote up the meme today for Buzzfeed: READ MORE

Here’s JCPenney’s response to the boycotting, caterwauling and whining about their use of Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson.

According
to the company, the two men who appear in the ad are “real-life dads
Todd Koch and Cooper Smith,” and the jubilant children are their kids,
Claire and Mason.

In other news about gay parents, Eagle Scout Zach Wahls delivered a petition with
250,000 signatures to the leadership of the Boy Scouts of America,
asking them to stop discriminating against gay parents. The petition was
a response to the Scouts prohibiting the lesbian mother of a 7 year-old
from being a Cub Scout den leader. Wahls is the author of My Two Moms,
which explains how his mothers taught him the virtues of the Boy Scout
Code. One of his mothers was his troop leader, because the Scouts leave
enforcement of their anti-homosexuality clause to the discretion of
local Scout organizations.

David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes. (photo: Richard Schulman/Corbis)

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers and Co.

01 June 12

e had the perfect headline all picked out for this piece but our colleague Paul Waldman at The American Prospect magazine beat us to the punch:

"It's Hard Out There for a Billionaire."

You see, according to Politico.com, the so-called "mega-donors," unleashed by Citizens United
and pouring boundless big bucks into this year's political campaigns,
are upset that their massive contributions are being exposed to public
view, ignoring the right of every one of us to know who is giving money
to candidates -- and the opportunity to try to figure out why.

"Quit picking on us" is part of Politico's
headline. Their article says that the mega-donors' "six- and
seven-figure contributions have... bought them nothing but grief."

This is definitely not what they had in mind. In their view,
cutting a million-dollar check to try to sway the presidential race
should be just another way to do their part for democracy, not a
fast-track to the front page.

Uh-huh. The sound you hear is the world's smallest
violin, say, a teeny-tiny Stradivarius insured for millions. "Is there a
group of people you can think of who have thinner skin than America's
multimillionaires and billionaires?' Paul Waldman asks.

Wall Street titans have been whining for a couple of years
now about the horror of people in politics criticizing ineffective
banking regulations and the favorable tax treatment so many wealthy
people receive... America's barons feel assaulted, victimized, wounded
in ways that not even a bracing ride to your Hamptons estate in your new
Porsche 911 can salve. And now that the presidential campaign is in
full swing, their tender feelings are being hurt left and right. READ MORE

In
November, California voters will vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a law to require
mandatory labeling of all GMO ingredients in processed foods, and ban
the routine industry practice of mislabeling foods containing GMO
ingredients as ‘natural.’

Polls
show that nearly 90% of the state’s voters plan to vote ‘yes.’ But
when November rolls around, will voter support still be strong? Not if
the biotech, agribusiness, and food manufacturers industries can help
it.

It’s estimated that the opposition will spend $60 million - $100 million
to convince voters that GMOs are perfectly safe. They’ll try to scare
voters into believing that labeling will make food more expensive, that
it will spark hundreds of lawsuits against small farmers and small
businesses, and that it will contribute to world hunger. None of this
is true. On the contrary, studies suggest just the opposite.READ MORE

Thanks to Good News Clubs, evangelism in schools is already
subverting the separation of church and state. Now they're justifying
the murder of nonbelievers.

May 31, 2012

The Bible has thousands of passages
that may serve as the basis for instruction and inspiration. Not all of
them are appropriate in all circumstances.

The
story of Saul and the Amalekites is a case in point. It's not a pretty
story, and it is often used by people who don't intend to do pretty
things. In the book of 1 Samuel (15:3), God said to Saul:

"Now
go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to
them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and
infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

Saul
dutifully exterminated the women, the children, the babies and all of
the men – but then he spared the king. He also saved some of the tastier
looking calves and lambs. God was furious with him for his failure to
finish the job.

The story of the Amalekites has been used to justify genocide throughout the ages. According to Pennsylvania State University Professor Philip Jenkins,
a contributing editor for the American Conservative, the Puritans used
this passage when they wanted to get rid of the Native American tribes.
Catholics used it against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics.
"In Rwanda in 1994, Hutu preachers invoked King Saul's memory to justify
the total slaughter of their Tutsi neighbors," writes Jenkins in his 2011 book, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses (HarperCollins). READ MORE

Eating too much and exercising too little, considered the
root of obesity, are not the only probable culprits.

May 31, 2012

A third of the U.S. population is
now overweight, making it just a matter of time before normal-size
people are actually in the minority. Americans have so ballooned in
size, government safety regulators worry that airline seats and belts won't restrain today's men who average 194 pounds and women who average 165 pounds, in a crash.

Not everyone agrees that obesity is always a health problem.
You can be overweight and still have normal blood pressure, blood
sugar, HDL cholesterol and other metabolic markers if you exercise, say
some, pointing to U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, who hiked the Grand Canyon in 2010 despite her extra poundage.

But others say fitness and exercise will not reverse the health effects of obesity. The British medical journal The Lancet recently reported that rising obesity in the U.K. will cause an extra half a million cases
of heart disease, 700,000 cases of diabetes and 130,000 of cancer by
2030. And the overweight and obese are 80 percent more likely to develop
dementia writes Kerry Trueman on AlterNet.

In this July 14, 2011, file photo, President Barack Obama sits with House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, as he meets with Republican and Democratic leaders regarding the debt ceiling in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, July 14, 2011. Obama's decision to haul lawmakers in day by day to negotiate a debt deal comes down to reality: He has no other choice. The president has essentially cleared his agenda to deal with one enormous crisis. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)(Credit: AP)

The potentially catastrophic effects of a default are finally sinking in with Americans

62
percent of self-identified Democrats said they would want Democratic
leaders in the House and Senate to make compromises to gain consensus on
the current budget debate, while only 43 percent of Republicans want to
see their party leaders concede some of their positions. However,
around 70 percent of independent respondents said they wanted to see
both parties compromise.READ MORE

A former Bush director uses the Washington Post to advocate dangerous policies he would personally profit from

In a political culture drowning in hidden conflicts of interests,
exploitation of political office for profit, and a rapidly eroding wall
separating the public and private spheres, Michael McConnell stands out
as the perfect embodiment of all those afflictions. Few people have
blurred the line between public office and private profit more
egregiously and shamelessly than he. McConnell’s behavior is the
classic never-ending “revolving door” syndrome: public officials serve
private interests while in office and are then lavishly rewarded by
those same interests once they leave. He went from being head of
the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz
Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors,
then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.READ MORE

Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. said that Zimmerman engaged in "material falsehood" about money in issuing his ruling.

About
an hour before the ruling came, prosecutors in the second-degree murder
case again Zimmerman had filed a new motion requesting the bond
revocation.They contended Zimmerman's wife knew about the donations he
had collected through a PayPal account, but didn't mention the money at
his bond hearing.

Zimmerman's PayPal account collected more than $200,000, his attorney later revealed.

"Defendant
has intentionally deceived the court with the assistance of his wife,
Shelley Zimmerman.

During the jail phone calls both of them spoke in
code to hide what they were doing," the motion read.

The judge said Zimmerman had misled the court at his bond hearing.

The defense says the finances are an innocent misunderstanding. READ MORE

The manufacturer of Fanta is being urged to help
address the poor conditions and low wages endured by some African
migrant workers harvesting oranges in southern Italy. Andrew Wasley
reports from Rosarno

It is perhaps the worst address in Western Europe. A ramshackle
slum with a noisy road on one side, a railway on another, and a
stagnant-looking river flowing close-by. The camp itself consists of
little more than a collection of shoddily-erected canvas tents and some
abandoned buildings and sheds.

They are from Africa – Ghana,
Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast – and this squalid camp, where doctors say
conditions are as bad, or worse, than in refugee camps in war zones, is
currently home to at least two hundred itinerants.

The migrants
are here in Rosarno, in Calabria, southern Italy, to harvest the
region's extensive orange crop. Each winter, as many as 2000 migrants
travel to this small agricultural town to scratch a living picking
oranges that will end up on sale in markets and supermarkets, or as
juices or concentrates used in the manufacture of soft drinks. READ MORE

Background

The plaintiffs, Mildred Loving (née Mildred Delores Jeter, a woman of African and RappahannockNative American descent, July 22, 1939 – May 2, 2008)[2][3][4] and Richard Perry Loving (a white man, October 29, 1933 – June 1975),[5] were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade the Racial Integrity Act, a state law banning marriages between any white person and any non-white person. Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia,
they were charged with violation of the ban. They were found sleeping
in their bed by a group of police officers who had invaded their home in
the hopes of finding them in the act of sex (another crime). In their
defense, Mrs. Loving had pointed to a marriage certificate on the wall
in their bedroom; rather than defending them, it became the evidence the
police needed for a criminal charge, because it proved they had been
married in another state. Specifically, they were charged under Section
20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from
being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section
20-59, which classified miscegenation
as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five
years. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pled guilty and were sentenced to
one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on
condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge
in the case, Leon M. Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed that

“

Almighty
God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed
them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his
arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he
separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

”

The Lovings moved to the District of Columbia, and on November 6, 1963, the American Civil Liberties Union
filed a motion on their behalf in the state trial court to vacate the
judgment and set aside the sentence on the grounds that the violated
statutes ran counter to the Fourteenth Amendment.
This set in motion a series of lawsuits which ultimately reached the
Supreme Court. On October 28, 1964, after their motion still had not
been decided, the Lovings began a class action suit in the U.S District
Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. On January 22, 1965, the
three-judge district court decided to allow the Lovings to present their
constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
Virginia Supreme Court Justice Harry L. Carrico
(later Chief Justice of the Court) wrote an opinion for the court
upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and,
after modifying the sentence, affirmed the criminal convictions.READ MORE

A stampede seems to be on the way as more and more groups break ties and dump ALEC. Intuit, Inc. (maker
of Quicken and QuickBooks accounting software) told the Center for
Media and Democracy (CMD) that Intuit also decided not to renew its
membership after it expired in 2011. That comment came from Bernie
McKay, Vice President of Government Affairs. He gave this response when
CMD identified that Intuit was no longer listed on the board and
contacted the company. CMD began its effort to spotlight Intuit and
other corporate funders and tie these corporations to the ALEC agenda
when it launched ALECexposed.org in July 2011.

Kraft Foods also announced that it won’t renew its membership in ALEC when it expires this spring, according to an email from Kraft Corporate Affairs Director Susan Davison. These announcements follow on the news thatCoca-Cola and Pepsi are out.

America’s millionaire population declined last year for the first time since the financial crisis, according to a new report.

The
population of U.S. millionaire households (households with investible
assets of $1 million or more) fell to 5,134,000 from 5,263,000 in 2011,
according to The Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth study.

Total private wealth in North America fell by 0.9 percent, to $38 trillion.

The
ultra-rich were the largest losers in dollar terms. Households in North
America with investible assets of more than $100 million saw their
wealth decline 2.4 percent. Their population declined slightly to 2,928
from 2,989.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

f
you want to see a perfect example of how completely broken our
regulatory system is, look no further than a speech that Daniel
Gallagher, one of the S.E.C.’s commissioners, recently gave in Denver,
Colorado.

It’s a speech whose full lunacy is hard to grasp without some background.

It’s by now been well-established that the S.E.C.’s
performance in policing Wall Street before, after, and during the crash
has been comically inept. It would be putting it generously to say that
the top cop on the financial services beat has demonstrated particular
incompetence with regard to investigations of high-profile targets at
powerhouse banks and financial companies. A less generous interpretation
would be that the agency is simply too afraid, too unwilling, or too
corrupt to take on the really dangerous animals in this particular
jungle.

The S.E.C.’s failure to make even one case against a
high-ranking executive involved in the mass frauds leading to the 2008
crash – compare this to the comparatively much smaller and less serious
S&L crisis twenty years earlier, when the government made 1,100
criminal cases and sent 800 bank officials to jail – became so
conspicuous that by the end of last year, the “No prosecutions of top figures” idea became an accepted meme in mainstream news media coverage of the economic crisis.

The S.E.C. in recent years has failed in almost every
possible way a regulator can fail to police powerful criminals. Failure
#1 was that it repeatedly fell down on the job even when alerted to
problems at big companies well ahead of time by insiders. Six months
before Lehman Brothers collapsed, setting off a chain reaction of losses
that crippled the world economy, one of Lehman’s attorneys, Oliver
Budde, contacted the S.E.C. to warn them that the firm had understated
CEO Dick Fuld's income by more than $200 million; the agency blew him off. There were similar brush-offs of insiders with compelling information in cases involving Moody’s, Chase, and both of the major Ponzi scheme scandals, i.e. the Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford cases.

The for-profit college and university business is a $30-billion-dollar
industry in the United States. According to investigative journalist
Daniel Golden, in the last decade, the for-profit colleges and
universities have tripled enrollment and recorded profits of $26
billion.(1)

For-profit colleges have been paying lavish and grotesquely huge
compensation to executives, both former and current, using money from
student loans and government grants for decades. For-profit college
executive compensation is currently under scrutiny by Congress because
nearly all revenues that constitute the exorbitant and scurrilous
executive pay packages come from federal grants, such as Pell Grants and
loans, and such as Stafford Loans under the Title IV program. These
grants and loans are tax monies collected by the government; they are
then turned into subsidies for the for-profit educational industry.
Double-digit annual growth in revenues and excessive executive
compensation coupled with deceptive marketing, high tuition, low
graduation rates and high loan default rates have driven a climate and
culture of student exploitation, misappropriation of public monies and
political corruption.

The average three-year default rate has been estimated at 22.4 percent
for for-profit colleges, 6.7 percent at private nonprofit colleges and
9.7 percent at public colleges.(2)
ProPublica, an online journalistic source, reported that the Department
of Education (DOE) indicated that over 40 percent of the money lent to
students at for-profit institutions would be in default at some point
over the life of the loans. READ MORE

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

he Dual Ridge Metal Boutique tissue boxes sold at Bed, Bath & Beyond stores have been discovered to be radioactive. Made with the extremely dangerous material used to blast cancer tumors with radiation - cobalt-60 - they emit gamma rays
that are known to cause both cancer and infertility. They were
manufactured in India, shipped on a commercial container to New Jersey,
and then distributed to Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in 20 states.

How much radiation do these tissue holders emit,
exactly? Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman David McIntyre said, on
the record, that standing near one of these tissue holders for 30
minutes a day would expose you to the equivalent of "a couple of chest
X-Rays" each year. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency went even
further, issuing a release stating that every 10 hours spent near the
product would expose you to the equivalent of one chest X-Ray (http://beaconnews.suntimes.com/news/9990656-418/no-immediate-threat-of-lo...).

In case you were wondering, a chest X-Ray is not a small dose of radiation.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) spent his first year in office trading in the welfareofthousandsofvulnerableMichiganders
in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to
refocus priorities in 2012, the state’s Senate Democrats have released a
new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan,
Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at
one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median
tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be
funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes
and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the
importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of
any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen
Whitmer, D-East Lansing. READ MORE

Ingestible chips, like these made by Proteus Biomedical, enter the body and send data to smartphones, 01/17/12. (photo: Michael Sugrue/Proteus)

By Steve Connor, The Independent UK

17 January 12

Pharmacy to sell edible microchips that will alert doctors if patients are not taking right medicines.

n
American biomedical company has signed up with a British healthcare
firm to sell digestible sensors, each smaller than a grain of sand, that
can trigger the transmission of medical information from a patient's
body to the mobile phone of a relative or carer.

The aim is to develop a suite of "intelligent
medicines" that can help patients and their carers keep track of which
pills are taken at what time of day, in order to ensure that complex
regimes of drugs are given the best possible chance of working
effectively.

Ultimately, the plan is for every one of the many
pills taken each day by some of the most chronically-ill patients,
especially those with mental health problems, to be digitally
time-stamped as they are digested within the body.

The healthcare company Lloyds- pharmacy said it
intends to sell the edible microchips of Proteus Biomedical of
California by the end of the year, as part of a trial to test whether
NHS patients would be prepared to pay privately to ensure that they or
their relatives take the right medicines at the right time. READ MORE

Inmates in a US prison being transferred, 06/15/09. (photo: public domain)

Russell Simmons and Dylan Ratigan, Reader Supported News

17 January 12

s
we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr, it appears
we are a far less prejudiced country than we once were. Individual
expressions of racism are less tolerated than ever, we have an
African-American President, and African-Americans are increasingly being
accepted into executive suites. Yet when we look closer, we find that
Greedy Bastards have rebranded racism and made it acceptable again, by
calling it "the war on drugs."

Since 1971, there have been more than 40 million arrests
for drug-related offenses. Even though blacks and whites have similar
levels of drug use, blacks are ten times as likely to be incarcerated
for drug crimes.

"There are more blacks under correctional
control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were
enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began." READ MORE

In the movie 'It's a Wonderful Life,' George Bailey is taken by his guardian angel, Clarence, into the alternate reality of poor choices called Pottersville. (photo: Paramount/IMDB)

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

17 January 12

The Republican presidential race has taken a
detour into the "class warfare" that the party supposedly despises, with
Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry tagging Mitt Romney as an elitist who got
rich by laying off workers. But this spat misses the larger point of
what the Right is doing to America, writes Robert Parry.

or
many years, it appeared that the Right wanted to take the United States
back to the 1950s - when blacks "knew their place," women were "in the
kitchen" and gays stayed "in the closet" - but it turns out that the
intended back-in-time-travel was to the 1920s, to an era of a few haves
and many have-nots, not only before the Civil Rights Movement but before
the Great American Middle-Class.

The Right's goal has been less to recreate the world
of "Father Knows Best" than to establish a national "Pottersville," like
in the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," where the existence of the
average man and woman was brutish and unfulfilling, while the 1 percent
of that age lived in gilded comfort and held sweeping power. READ MORE

Ellen Brown, Truthout: "The YouTube video of 12-year-old Victoria Grant
speaking at the Public Banking in America conference last month has gone
viral, topping a million views on various web sites. Monetary reform -
the contention that governments, not banks, should create and lend a
nation's money - has rarely even made the news, so this is a first.
Either the times they are a-changin', or Victoria managed to frame the
message in a way that was so simple and clear that even a child could
understand it." READ MORE

One big question at stake in the trial of George Zimmerman
for the killing of Trayvon Martin is whether Florida’s “Stand Your
Ground” self-defense laws will shield Zimmerman from conviction, as well
as subsequent civil action by Martin’s family. However, regardless of
Zimmerman’s fate, the homeowners association in the gated community
where Martin was killed could be liable for the teenager’s death.

Zimmerman was the official watch captain for the neighborhood

Questions abound about training and guidelines put forth by association

Homeowners associations liable for incidents in their communities

Captain of the Guard

When George Zimmerman prowled through the neighborhood looking for
suspicious people in The Retreat at Twin Lakes in central Florida, he
wasn’t acting totally out of the blue. Zimmerman was officially identified as the captain
of the neighborhood watch in a newsletter distributed by the
community’s homeowners association. Homeowners with concerns were
encouraged to contact Zimmerman “so he can be aware and help address the
issue with other residents.”READ MORE

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

SANFORD, Fla. — Last August, Wendy Dorival got a call about setting up a
local neighborhood watch. As the volunteer coordinator for the Police
Department here, she gets such calls regularly, and the city already had
at least 10 active watch groups. So she thought nothing of this call,
from George Zimmerman.

She set up a visit for the next month at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a
gated community that had been dealing with a string of burglaries. When
25 residents showed up, a decent turnout, she had the residents
introduce themselves; after all, people join the groups to look out for
each other. She then gave a PowerPoint presentation and distributed a
handbook. As she always does, she emphasized what a neighborhood watch
is — and what it is not.

In every presentation, “I go through what the rules and responsibilities
are,” she said Thursday. The volunteers’ role, she said, is “being the
eyes and ears” for the police, “not the vigilante.” Members of a
neighborhood watch “are not supposed to confront anyone,” she said. “We
get paid to get into harm’s way. You don’t do that. You just call them
from the safety of your home or your vehicle.”

Using a gun in the neighborhood watch role would be out of the question, she said in an interview.

---------excerpt---------->

A wide range of neighborhood watch organizations exist across the
country. Some have patrols, while others like Sanford’s do not. But the
National Sheriffs’ Association, which sponsors the program nationwide,
is absolutely clear on one point: guns have no place in a watch group. A
manual distributed by the association repeatedly underscores the point:
“Patrol members do not carry weapons.”

The manual warns that watch members should “not attempt to apprehend a
person committing a crime or to investigate a suspicious activity.” It
should be emphasized to members of patrols, the materials state, that
“they do not possess police power and they shall not carry weapons.” The
consequences of not following the guidelines are severe, the manual
states: “Each member is liable as an individual for civil and criminal
charges should he exceed his authority.”

Sunday, May 27, 2012

You remember, Florida, right? Land
of the hanging chad? A state in which a margin of several hundred votes
could determine the outcome of a presidential election — that is, of
course, if the U.S. Supreme Court allows the votes to be counted.

According
to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, eligible voters will be
removed from the voting rolls as a result of the massive voter purge
ordered by Governor Rick Scott. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a
spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told
ThinkProgress.

[…]

That
process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which [then Secretary
of State Kurt] Browning considered unreliable. The Fair Elections Legal
Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching
is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding
names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further,
some voters may have naturalized since their driver’s license
information was collected. READ MORE

Kendall Eskine, a psychologist at Loyola University New Orleans, examined the psychological impact of organics in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. His work builds on the concept of “moral licensing”—the notion that the doing of some kind of virtuous deed gives us license to engage in less than ethical behavior.

Eskine’s
experiment featured 62 undergraduates, who were told they were
participating in two unrelated studies—a consumer research survey and a
moral judgment test. They were first presented with photos of four
common food items, which they rated in terms of desirability. Some saw
pictures of healthy foods that were labeled organic (including an apple
and a tomato); others saw “comfort food” items such as ice cream and
cookies; and still others saw neutral foods, including oatmeal and
beans. READ MORE

We have the ability -- the freedom -- to roam more now than
ever before. And yet our upward mobility is standing still.

May 20, 2012

We’re a species that has gotten
around; we’ve wandered, pioneered and migrated to every corner of the
world. The spear tip of technology is how we can get somewhere else: the
wheel, the sailboat, the rocket. In short: we’re movers.

We
are now as mobile as we’ve ever been as a culture. Our phones are not
tethered to any particular location. Our keepsakes, like photos and
letters, are all saved on devices smaller than your average drugstore
paperback. The bitter visual of a breakup – the splitting up of a
couple’s CD collection – no longer exists since you both have copies of
the same MP3s. Your computer fits comfortably in your lap – everything
else is in your pocket. We now have the ability to go anywhere and bring
with us more things utilizing less space than at any other time in
human history. READ MORE

It should be no surprise that on America’s farms, many women
are treated as less than human, since not even the government sees them
as worthy of respect under the law.

May 27, 2012

There aren’t many jobs in the U.S.
that are tougher than farmwork--spending the day picking crops under a
sweltering sun, earning just enough to survive, jumping from one
unstable seasonal job to another. But the job is especially unbearable
if all you have to work yourself to exhaustion all day under the watch
of the man who raped you.

The irrepressible comic is trying to bring attention to electoral issues that are too often ignored.

May 27, 2012

Roseanne Barr leveraged her comedic
skills to become a household name. But while she's known for her biting
humor, and some critically acclaimed acting in the film adaptation of
Fay Weldon's novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Barr's
life experiences also left her with an appreciation of just how hard it
is to climb the ladder today. It was reflected in her writing; in her
standup routine and on her hit TV show, Roseanne was always most
comfortable breathing life into the struggles of working-class families.
An outspoken small “d” democrat, Roseanne is now running to head the
Green Party's presidential ticket on a platform that stresses empowering
the “little guy.”

A few weeks back, AlterNet interviewed Jill Stein, Barr's primary opponent in the race (you can read that interview here).
This week, Barr appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour for some equal
time. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can
listen to the whole show here).

Mary Glover is taking on Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo--but a
court decision could leave her and thousands of other homeowners
without a hope of justice.

May 27, 2012

Mary Glover, a Pittsburgh-area
homeowner living on Social Security disability income, is taking on
Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, charging that they've violated federal
and state consumer protection laws and breached contracts.

Yet,
because of a decision by one judge, she and thousands of homeowners
like her could be priced out of their ability to fight back in court
against shady dealings by the nation's biggest banks. And while the
decision in this case may seem exceptional, as Dahlia Lithwick
and others have pointed out, it's part of a disturbing pattern of the
courts shutting their doors to everyday litigants and class-action
suits—and in some cases, literally handing corporations a playbook on
how to get away with screwing over the little guy.

The first post-Occupy Ivy League classes are graduating.
Will they be any less likely than their predecessors to flock into
finance?

May 27, 2012

The Ivy League classes of 2012
arrived on campuses in fall of 2008, just as the world economy was
plunging into a Wall Street-driven freefall. Many were glad they
weren’t out facing a nasty job market. But they worried about the
future. They networked earlier. They fretted over internships.

Their
senior year started with the launch of the Occupy movement, which
raised a collective fist at the financiers whose casino games wrecked
the economy. A few students from elite colleges even joined the protest.
Back in November, some Harvard students interrupted a Goldman Sachs recruiting event hosted by the Office of Career Services.

But
now the show is over, and it’s time to don the caps and gowns. Will
students be any less likely to flock to Wall Street this year? READ MORE

Emanuela Orlandi was kidnapped for sex parties, with Vatican security
acting on behalf of foreign diplomats, a controversial priest inside
the Holy See told an Italian newspaper.

Orlandi, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, disappeared from Rome’s streets 29 years ago after a flute lesson.
Italy has long fixated on her disappearance, and now Father Gabriele
Amorth has added to the mystery by saying Vatican security abducted her
for sex parties with foreign diplomats, The Telegraph reported.

“Parties were organized, with a Vatican gendarme acting as the ‘recruiter’ of the girls,” Amorth told La Stampa,
as translated by The Telegraph. “The network involved diplomatic
personnel from a foreign embassy to the Holy See. I believe Emanuela
ended up a victim of this circle.”

Amorth, who said Orlandi was later murdered, is no stranger to controversy.

Pope John Paul II appointed him the Vatican’s chief exorcist, and he
generated international headlines late last year when he claimed yoga
and Harry Potter were both evil.READ MORE